The Influence of Posture upon Cardiovascular Dynamics Throughout Pregnancy

Abstract

1980) Postural blood pressure differences in prcgnancy: A prospectivc study of blood pressurc differences between supine and left lateral position as measured by ultrasound. A m J

Cardiac structure and function in normal pregnancy

“…Most studies concur that diastolic blood pressure (DBP) decreases during the first trimester, is stable or slightly reduced during the second trimester and increases during the third trimester [4,16,17,21,34]. MAP seems to parallel the changes of DBP [2,[5][6][7]12,13,[19][20][21]23,25,[29][30][31][32]35] (Table 1 and supplementary table S2, http://links.lww.com/COOG/ A1).…”

“…TVR follows a pattern similar to that of MAP, with an early decrease at 8 weeks of gestational age, nadir at 28 weeks and slight increase towards term [4][5][6][7]16,17,19,22] (Fig. 1).…”

“…The increase in HR starts in the first trimester, peaks at 15-25% higher in the third trimester and returns to preconception levels within the first 10 postpartum days [2,[4][5][6][7][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33].…”

“…There is a general consensus that the systolic blood pressure (SBP) does not change significantly in pregnancy [16,17,19,21,23,25,32,34,35]. Most studies concur that diastolic blood pressure (DBP) decreases during the first trimester, is stable or slightly reduced during the second trimester and increases during the third trimester [4,16,17,21,34].…”

“…SV rises by about 20-30% in pregnancy, but there is significant disagreement about the time course of SV changes during pregnancy (supplementary table S2, http://links. lww.com/COOG/A1) [2,4,5,12,[16][17][18]20,21,23,25,[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. SV can be calculated from the product of aortic Doppler flow velocity time integral and cross-sectional area (CSA) of the left ventricle outflow tract (LVOT), where slight differences in LVOT diameter will have a great impact on measurement error.…”